A recovering heroin addict - caught trying to sell more than a pound of marijuana in Golden Gate Park - accused San Francisco narcotics officers of enlisting her to sell drugs they had seized as evidence.

No one believed Daisy Bram's claims back in 2010. But they are now at the heart of a federal indictment of two current officers and a former officer on charges including drug conspiracy, theft from a government program and civil rights violations.

Bram's accusations are spelled out in the federal indictment, which was unsealed Thursday. The officers, who worked out of the department's Mission Station on Valencia Street, stole marijuana they had seized as evidence and used two informants to sell it on the street, the indictment says. Bram and her partner say they were the informants.

Two of the three defendants - Sgt. Ian Furminger, 47, and former Officer Reynaldo Vargas, 45 - have pleaded not guilty. The third, Officer Edmond Robles, 46, deferred entering a plea last week while he arranged for legal representation.

An attorney who spoke on their behalf said Friday that the case was the product of dubious accusations from unreliable sources.

How it began

Bram, 33, remains as unlikely a witness as ever - she's just finished serving a sentence in Butte County Jail for felony marijuana cultivation and sales.

She said that after she began cooperating with federal agents who were investigating the San Francisco officers, local authorities raided her in-home marijuana-growing operation in Butte County. Then she moved to Tehama County, and it happened again.

"I really feel totally used," Bram said in an interview from jail last week. "This is not the life I wanted."

Her involvement in the biggest San Francisco police scandal in more than a decade began in 2008, when she and her partner, Jayme Walsh, were both strung out on heroin and living in a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Mission.

Walsh, now 34, recalled how he and Bram walked into Mission Station to complain that Bram was being menaced by a drug dealer. The narcotics unit investigator who interviewed the couple, Walsh said, was Vargas.

Walsh was a convicted drug felon, and he doubted police would take him seriously. But Bram wanted to pursue the matter.

What they didn't know was that Vargas had his own problematic past. He almost lost his job because of a 2002 incident in which he slashed the face of a cable-car fare evader with the man's broken crack pipe as he shouted, "Eat it," according to Police Department records.

Vargas saved his career only by admitting to the incident before the Police Commission and accepting a six-month suspension.

Acting as informants

The 2008 interview session ended with the couple agreeing to act as police informants, Walsh said. Vargas and other Mission Station officers would supply them with money and drugs in exchange for information about who was dealing on the street, Walsh said.

Vargas and the other two officers indicted last week, Furminger and Robles, picked up the evidence. According to the federal indictment, Vargas approached two unnamed informants and offered to let them have 25 percent of the proceeds if they sold some of the seized marijuana.

Walsh and Bram said they were the informants, an assertion that local and federal law enforcement sources confirmed.

"The idea of selling drugs came out of the blue," Walsh said.

Separate arrests

But the effort failed miserably: Walsh was promptly arrested trying to sell some of the marijuana in Golden Gate Park. He still had Furminger's card in his wallet.

Park Station officers called Furminger. "Give him his s- back, and let him go," Walsh said he recalled hearing the sergeant say over the phone.

Walsh was freed with no charges and given back the marijuana, law enforcement sources said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because grand jury testimony in the case remains sealed.

A few days later, it was Bram's turn to be arrested, also as she tried to sell marijuana in the park. She called Vargas from lockup and - in a conversation that was secretly recorded - he shushed her as she asked him for help, the law enforcement sources said.

She spent five days in jail, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was released, court records show.

At this point, the couple decided to move to Iowa. Bram, off heroin and trying to get a job, worried that her conviction could be a problem. She says she called Furminger in early 2010 to ask for his help in clearing her record.

The sergeant was anything but helpful, Bram said. According to her, he threatened to hunt the couple down and shoot them "like dogs."

Bram telephoned the city's Office of Citizen Complaints, which investigates allegations of officer misconduct, and filed a case. She also called the FBI, trying to interest the agency in her complaint about drug-stealing cops.

"I thought it was a waste of time," Walsh said. "The feds - they laughed at her. 'Stealing drugs. Yeah, right.' "

The city agency cleared the officers of stealing seized narcotics, but Furminger got a two-day suspension for being abusive during the call. It looked like that would be the end of it.

Marijuana raids

But in early 2011, Public Defender Jeff Adachi revealed a series of surveillance videos from a single-room-occupancy hotel showing Mission and Southern Station narcotics officers taking property that was never accounted for. One of the officers implicated was Vargas.

Not long after that, Walsh said, the FBI began calling the home of Bram's grandfather in Iowa, looking for the couple. By this time the pair had returned to California to raise a family near Oroville in Butte County, where they soon encountered more trouble.

In September 2011, a month after the couple say federal investigators interviewed them about the revived case against the San Francisco officers, authorities in Butte County raided the marijuana-growing operation at their home. They say they were growing it for their own medicinal use.

A second marijuana raid came in January 2013 at their new home in Red Bluff (Tehama County), two days after they were served subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury, the couple say.

Walsh doesn't think the timing was a coincidence. "This is a law enforcement campaign to discredit us," he said.

Bram appeared before the grand jury, but Walsh refused to.

The Tehama County charges were eventually dropped. But in Butte County, a jury didn't buy Bram's story and convicted her of growing marijuana for sale.

She also was found guilty of misdemeanor child endangerment, and social services officials barred her from seeing her three young children for more than an hour a week. Walsh is awaiting trial on similar charges.

The Butte County prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Jeff Greeson, says one of the marijuana raids was the result of a routine law enforcement screening of possible growing operations, and the other grew out of a referral from social service officials.

Greeson said Butte County investigators hadn't known of the federal probe in San Francisco before the arrests.

"Officers were surprised when they were told they are cooperating with a federal investigation, and their response was, 'Yeah, sure, they all are,' " he said.

'Credibility problems'

To Michael Rains, an attorney speaking for the current and former San Francisco officers facing charges, there's no reason to put any credence in Walsh and Bram's stories.

"They have been arrested and rearrested countless times since they provided information about these guys," Rains said. "These informants have substantial credibility problems."

Greeson said it had been easy to build a drug case against the couple. There were 100 marijuana plants in their house outside Oroville, and drug paraphernalia, including needles, were everywhere, the prosecutor said.

"That stuff in San Francisco has absolutely no bearing on the charges in Butte County," Greeson said. "They have received no special treatment - either to their benefit or to their detriment.

"What happened to that couple in San Francisco was awful, and I'm looking forward to that case being resolved. But it has nothing to do with law enforcement in Butte County."

Bram was released from Butte County Jail on Saturday. She remains convinced she's been punished for telling the truth about the San Francisco officers.

"I just think it's really suspect," she said, "that all this is going down the way it has."